Mayan apocalypse: Vatican says 'the end is not nigh – for now'

It has created panic buying and retreats to "mystical" mountains
around the world, but a Mayan prophecy that predicts the end of the world on
December 21 has been rubbished by the Vatican's chief astronomer.

In a front-page editorial titled "The end is not nigh – at least for now" in the Vatican's daily newspaper, Father Jose Gabriel Funes said there was no danger of an impending Apocalypse.

"In the media and on the internet there is a great deal of talk of the end of the world, which the Mayans supposedly predicted for Dec 21. If you do a search on Google, you get 40 million results on the topic," Father Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, wrote in L'Osservatore Romano.

It was "not even worth discussing the scientific basis of these claims," the Jesuit priest from Argentina said in the article, which criticised "pseudo-prophecies" about the end of the world.

He acknowledged that the Universe was slowly expanding but that the destruction of the Earth – if it ever happens – will not occur for billions of years.

In any case, Christians subscribed to the "fundamental conviction that death is not the last word."

Father Funes, who has a master's degree in astronomy from the National University of Cordoba in Argentina as well as degrees in philosophy and theology, was made director of the Vatican Observatory in 2006.

In an interview two years later, he said it was possible that intelligent forms of life could exist on other planets in the solar system.

He said the notion did not necessarily contradict the teachings of the Catholic Church, arguing that to dismiss such a possibility would be to underestimate God's creative powers.

Aliens would still be God's creatures, he said, in an article in L'Osservatore Romano headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother."

A 5,125-year cycle known in the Mayan calendar as the Long Count comes to an end on Dec 21, and has been widely interpreted by cultists, New Age disciples and believers in the esoteric as heralding the end of the universe.

Believers have also gathered in areas across Europe, including the French village of Bugarach, where the mayor has been forced to ban UFO watchers and light aircraft from flat-topped mountain, Pic de Bugarach, seen by some as an “alien garage”.

The US space agency NASA intervened in the debate earlier this month, posting a nearly hour-long YouTube video debunking the idea of an impending Apocalypse.

"I think this tells us more about ourselves, particularly in the Western world, than it does about the ancient Maya," Geoffrey Braswell, an associate professor of anthropology and leading Maya scholar at the University of California, San Diego, told The Associated Press.

"The idea that the world will end soon is a very strong belief in Western cultures. ... The Maya, we don't really know if they believed the world would ever end."